India is and has been a land of pluralism par excellence. Symbiotic co-existence of diverse forms of life, as a given,
immutable fact associated with human existence, grounds every sphere of life,
religious, legal, cultural, social, etc. Accommodation of diversity, neither to
tame nor simply to tolerate it, but to allow it a natural flourishing, has
always been the principal criteria for organising individual and social
existence in India. Traditionally, acceptance of diversity and pluralism as
internal criteria for social existence had ensured that different social groups
or communities could enjoy, to the maximum extent, freedom to nurture diverse
methods or ways for, organising, sustaining and perpetuating their particular
forms of life. In other words, prevalence of these criteria enjoined that law
could be seen and understood as what members of any community or group treat as
law. This original and pluralistic outlook on the world and on society may
explain that pre-colonial India did not move in the direction of what is
understood as “modern law” which is characterized by a thrust towards
uniformization and a “gardening” of society[1]
through a legal system that is abstracted from social life. Indeed, modern law
is characterized by general and impersonal rules to be imposed in a uniform way
by an external authority, the state, which holds the monopoly of legitimate
violence. For a long time the modern project of the rationalization of
society’s organization via state law and the walk towards uniformity, usually
presented as a move towards universality, has been equated to civilization
whereas pluralism was interpreted as a sign of allegedly ‘primitive’ societies.

It is interesting to note that legal pluralism, as an
academic/scientific concept is closely related to the West’s colonial past :
the unitary myth of law was challenged by the coexistence in the “civilized
societies” colonies of colonial law with multiple indigenous systems of
“primitive law”. Sally Engle Merry notes, “Early twentieth century studies
examined indigenous law ways among tribal and village peoples in colonised
societies in Africa, Asia and the Pacific. Social scientists (primarily
anthropologists) were interested in how these people maintained social order
without European law.”[2]

Having found its raw material in the
‘exotic’ remote corners of the world, in 21st century, the concept of legal
pluralism seems to have transcended geographical boundaries. Nowadays it is not
anymore confined to “exotic societies” but serves as a general tool to
understand law in all its complexity. As Sally Engle Merry points out, “the
intellectual odyssey of the concept of legal pluralism moves from the discovery
of indigenous forms of law among remote African villagers and New Guinea
tribesmen to debates concerning the pluralistic qualities of law under advanced
capitalism.”[3] After a long
spell of modernity and its emphasis on uniformity, homogenisation, certainty,
it appears that the academic world cannot ignore any longer that ‘every society
is legally plural, whether or not it has a colonised past.’[4]

In addition to the geographical
development, in last years, this concept has also undergone internal conceptual
evolution, as the use of terminology such as ‘weak legal pluralism’, ‘strong
legal pluralism’[5]; ‘classic
legal pluralism’ and ‘new legal pluralism’[6]
indicate. Realisation about the inadequacy of hitherto accepted terms such as
‘customary law’ to denote the legal phenomena of the “indigenous” societies are
reflected in the on-going attempts to find the labels for identifying legal
systems based on different understandings of law, such as official law, state
law, modern law, unofficial law, folk law, people’s law, tribal law, indigenous
law, non-state law, customary law, received law, imposed law, transplanted law.[7]
Some of the initial approaches towards legal pluralism which with hindsight
appear to be restrictive, undoubtedly, prepared a platform for constructive
deployment of the concept. They offered groundwork for the emergence of some
insightful approaches such as ‘intercultural approach to law’[8],
‘critical legal pluralism’.[9]
They have led scholars to suggest refined and complex methodological approaches
in order to get a better and wider understanding of the legal phenomena of
different societies.[10]

Roderick Macdonald presenting his
approach as critical legal pluralism challenges the traditional conception of
legal pluralism as interaction of neatly defined official and unofficial
normative orders in one social field. He emphasises, ‘ “the normative regimes
sought to be identified in a legal pluralistic approach are not stable,
unambiguous, and self-contained regimes interacting along clear boundaries.”[11]
He adds, ‘this conception of legal pluralism suggests that the sites of
normative interaction operate on several levels at once, often taking the form
of a broad zone of adjustment, in dynamic evolution and redefinition. These
levels include the individual, the group and the societal.’[12]He underscores, ‘a critical legal pluralism’ twists the traditional
analyses of law and society inside out. Rather than beginning with the premise
that society (and communities) are entities that law can treat, it investigates
how community members treat law. …. The law is within all members of the
society.’[13] These
reflexions echo Jacques Vanderlinden’s new concept of legal pluralism. He also
points out to the colonial roots which need to be transcended in order not to
see legal pluralism just as a coexistence of different legal systems which
apply to a same situation within a society, but as more radically pluralistic
phenomenon which has to focus on legal pluralism at the level of the individual.[14]
Some authors although fundamentally interested in the plural nature of law
prefer to avoid to use the term legal pluralism. Étienne Le Roy for instance
prefers to talk of “multilegalism” (multijuridisme in French) to rather refer to the
plural nature of law, understood as legal phenomenon, itself, rather than just
an addition of “laws” or “legal systems”.[15]
This choice is consistent with Robert Vachon’s insights on the intercultural
constraints of a reflexion on legal pluralism. Robert vachon advocates a much
more pluralistic and intercultural “legal pluralism” than what is usually
understood by the concept and which remains a very Western concept.[16]
Some of the present ‘epistemological challenges’ are certainly to ensure that
analyses focussed on legal pluralism do not obscure more than they reveal, that
they do not fall in the trap of the ‘encompassing the contrary’ while pursuing
the task of understanding culturally diverse realities of human existence.
Therefore a shift towards the understanding of the plural nature of law seems
necessary in correlation with the question of intercultural comparison or
dialogue between different “legal traditions”.[17]

Increasing deployment of the concept of
legal pluralism in scientific, scholarly works along with constant rethinking
of the epistemological framework for understanding legal phenomena in different
societies indicate that the socio-legal world is realising the futility and
impossibility of delimiting life spheres into distinct autonomous domains, such
as law, religion, morality, politics. Gradually it is being considered
necessary to unveil the ‘myth of modernity’,[18]
to lay bare the ‘mythology of modern law’,[19]
to unmask the precocious claims of the ‘civilised’ world for the conquest of
reason over myths, of rationality over irrationality. This concept has offered
some tools to question the notions of ‘civilisational progress’.Passing through a phase of academic
scepticism, resistance, rejection, ridicule, ignorance[20]
in last few decades,[21]
it can now be claimed, that legal pluralism has gained itself a place as a ‘key
concept in a postmodern view of law’,[22]
as a ‘central theme in the reconceptualisation of the law/society relation’.[23]

At this stage of the growth and
acceptance of the concept of legal pluralism, an aspiration can be expressed
that increasing awareness of its utility will ultimately serve the purpose of
enriching our general understanding of law and of the relationship between law
and society in all legal systems, having colonial past or not. For countries
with the colonial past it can be asserted more confidently that the
formal/official recognition in the academic world that law is what different
groups or communities treat to be law will have special significance. One can
hope that this recognition will direct academic energies for fighting the
widely prevalent elitist tendencies, which have painted indigenous complex
legal systems as ‘frustrating, messy, and obstructive to progress.’[24]Perhaps, ways could be devised for resurgence of the indigenous
practices, which have either been pushed out of sight, or have been
derecognised, illegalised, or simply ignored earlier as a result of
colonisation and now in the post-colonial era in order to realise
‘modernisation’. A serious and open recognition of legal pluralism can be
expected to generate genuine interest in diverse indigenous ways of life on
their own terms, not for the purposes of reforming them in accordance with
certain pre-determined notions of ‘progress’. It will perhaps be possible to restore
people’s autonomy over their life spheres, to reduce communities’ dependence on
all powerful state, to find measures to bring the state and its law to its
supervisory, facilitative role which enjoys not an autonomous but a symbiotic
existence with the society.[25]

The collection of essays presented in
this volume embodies most of the above-mentioned challenges, problems and
aspirations associated with the concept of legal pluralism in India. Like any
other ex-colony, post-colonial India too, maintains an ambivalent attitude
towards pluralism in general and legal pluralism in particular. While pluralism
and diversity continues to characterise every aspect of life, zeal of modernity
and ‘development’ has pushed it into the domain of unofficial yet highly influential
reality. Until recently, the academic scholarship on India, both by Indians and
Western scholars, has either ignored the domain of unofficial reality or has
analysed it through colonial (Western) frame of reference. Perception of
indigenous ways of life as backward, as obstacle to progress still informs the
post-colonial scholarship advocating legal reforms.[26]
However, scholarship in the last two decades reflects a shift where young
scholars have considered the existing frameworks of analysis as wanting as well
as misrepresentative of Indian socio-legal reality. ‘Epistemological
challenges’ calling for rethinking the analytic frameworks that have so far
been deployed to make sense of Indian reality have begun to emerge. Necessity
of comprehending legal phenomena through ‘intercultural approaches to law’ is
being emphasised.The signs of
moving towards ‘critical legal pluralism’ instead of ‘traditional legal
pluralism’, analysing legal pluralism as a matter of interaction of state legal
system and non-state legal system[27]can be seen on the horizon. Another trend, which could be seen as yet
another step, is the move from a focus on legal pluralism to a focus on a
pluralist approach to law, understood as legal phenomenon.[28]

This special issue on the legal
pluralism in India is an attempt to catch this encouraging shift in the
scholarship. The contributions included in the volume, by no means exhaustive,
yet represent a broad range of issues and challenges for the Indian socio-legal
scholarship. Considering the nature of the contributions, this volume can be
divided into three main waves. The first wave of contributions deals with legal
pluralism in the context of natural resources’ management and is thus also
closely related to the question of sustainable and participatory development.
The second wave of texts is concerned with family law and what we could term
more specifically women’s rights. The last papers deal with the question of
legal pluralism on the level of the political and legal ordering of the Indian
state.

Ajit
Menon introduces our reflexion with an example of legal pluralism and land use
change in the Kolli Hills. He provides a good overview of scholarship on legal
pluralism before illustrating the stakes in a concrete example which raise our
awareness to the fact that legal pluralism is not only about conflicting or
coexisting legal orders, but also about a pluralism of worldvisions and of
interpretations of the world. Even the legal objects “forests” and “forest
resources” are constructed realities. State law appears thus more than only an
order of regulation. It is also a symbolic order. By the force given to it by
the state it may appear as a universal and objective view of reality but
concrete field studies show the pretention of this view. They reveal the
relativity of interpretations of the world and illustrate the complexity of
interacting visions, discourses, practices and regulations. As Ajit Menon notes
“customary law is not necessarily a well articulated phenomenon with clearly defined
rules of use (as opposed to rules in use) and procedures for monitoring and
enforcing these rules.” In order to understand it, one needs to adopt a more
open-ended approach and to reverse the point of view : the question of land use
practices must not be asked from the point of view of law. Rather the contours
of law emerge through thorough analysis of the land use practices. This insight
that social life is not an application of law, but that law is only the tip of
the iceberg of social relations and can only be understood by being referred to
the whole social reality will also be underscored in numerous other
contributions.

Satapriya
Rout’s article on customary rights and legal pluralism in joint forest
management in Orissa echoes Ajit Menon’s analyses. It also highlights the fact
that pluralism not only exists between state legal orders and customary orders.
On the one hand the state is far from being a monolithic block. “Several
institutions of state mechanism often come out with contradictory policies,
which are based on different sets of legal regulations and pursue different
interests.” On the other hand “traditional practices” are also pluralist and
most important their mutual interplay and relationship with state law can only
be understood in their dynamics : “the basic physical nature of natural
resource is such that it is embedded in an environment where action by one
individual or a group of individuals to capture it may affect the amount of
resources available for others. (…) The complex and unequal power relations
among wide range of actors in the social space where the natural resource is
embedded also forms a reason for conflicts over it …” It appears very clearly
in this article that rethinking law from the point of view of society forces us
to abandon a static view of law and to engage in a dynamic approach.

J.B.
Rajan shifts our attention from forests to fisheries, through a study of legal
pluralism of fishing rights in Peechi Reservoir, Kerala. The author introduces
the transnational horizon in his paper as his study analyses the effects of an
Indo-German Reservoir Fisheries Development Project whose object it was to
better the living conditions of economically and socially backward communities
by improving fisheries as a source of income of the rural population living on
the shore of artificial lakes in Kerala. The project introduced major changes
in the area and led to a conflict between the new fishers whose rights were
guaranteed by the state, and the traditional fishers who lost all their rights,
their customary rights not been recognized. As the author notes in his
conclusion “The Government perceived the programme for scheduled
trube/scheduled castes, but could not foresee the other customary users of the
reservoir. The settlers, who have been utilizing the fish resources for a long
time, have not been considered while formulating the IGRFDP. (…) there is an
increasing multiplicity of rules attached to the use of natural resources and
an apparently ensuing increase of confusion and frustration on the part of both
the makers and the targets of the law. (…) The ultimate result is that the
German team has withdrawn from the project with the disgrace of utter failure !
This gives a lesson to consider legal pluralism while formulating policies and
laws by the state.”

With
Ruchi Pant’s analysis of the Impact of Transnational Processes of Law on Right
to Water, we stay in the domain of rights on water. As in J.B. Rajan’s text
awareness is also attracted towards transnational actors. Ruchi Pant brings in
a new element in the reflexion through the question of a fundamental right to
water as human right sanctioned by international human rights law. Pluralism,
as seen above exists not only amongst legal orders, but also within them. If we
were already confronted to customs’ pluralism, state law’s pluralism, the
author draws attention to the pluralism of global or transnational law : “On
the one hand, there is substantial body of international law which ascribes a
natural right of all people to water, yet on the other hand one can see the
looming threats from a new body of international law which results in the
violation of this basic right. The trend of privatisaton of services including
water under the new trade regime is being perceived as a major violation of
human rights by curtailing peoples’ rights to water thereby affecting their
livelihood and life.” In between “global hegemony” and “fractured sovereignty”,
it seems to be necessary to rethink the role and the responsibilities of the
state as a link between the global and the local forces and stakes.

The
second wave of contributions on women’s rights, is introduced by Livia Holden
with a study on divorcing by custom and women’s agencies and lawyers’ praxis in
(un)official Hindu law. The stress on the lawyer’s praxis is extremely
interesting as the latter seems to act in a space in-between customary visions,
practices and discourses and the state law. It even gains interest as the
observed practice, divorce, is not really accepted in the traditional view.
Thus here again the positing of the analysis on the ground of practices and not
of theoretical discourses of mainstream Hindu tradition or of state law permits
to understand the complex interweaving of discourses and practices in a way to
make sense for all the concerned parties. “In such a complex and ambiguous
situation, the notaries public of the small towns perform a skilful job as
privileged interpreters of both customers and official law, juggling between
the agencies of their clients and the positivist and centralist needs of the
formal legal system. As it has been seen in the lawyer’s discourses official
law provides the tools for both recognizing and reducing customary divorce to
non-representative exceptions confirming the orthodox rule of indissolubility
of Hindu marriage.” The author further notes that although a certain métissage and a certain flexibility is achieved, the
underlying worldvision nevertheless remains the one of the Hindu orthodox view
of the sacredness and indissolubility of marriage. It appears that on the level
of practice many arrangements and negotiation of solutions are possible which
seem completely unthinkable from a purely theoretical point of view.

Reena Patel’s contribution
is slightly more positivistic than the other contributions. It deals with
Women’s Rights to Property under Hindu Law and seeks to evaluate the extent to
which the current law in India provides a framework for independent ownership
rights of Hindu women. In order to do so the author choses to put her analysis
in a historical perspective, thus showing that “the development of Hindu law
has resulted in the institution of religious normsas binding law within the
contemporary legal system. To the extent that enacted laws establish the
legitimacy and operation of religious norms (…) there arises a tension when
alien principles are brought within the frame of existing religious / legal
norms. Thus (…) law operates to perpetuate and actively sanction the practice
of religious norms and values affecting the individual directly, and social
institutions like the family, indirectly.” This meeting of legal and religious
and cultural norms is a good illustration of the complexities and the stakes of
legal pluralism and does more specifically put the question of legal reforms in
the light of legal pluralism as is well illustrated in the author’s conclusion
: “Whereas the normative
structure of classical Hindu Law is based upon a conception of the female as
dependent, servile and lacking autonomy, the present legal regime seeks to
build upon that very same structure in order to create and establish the Hindu
female as an autonomous property-holding individual. Although it seeks to go
beyond the entitlements due to females in terms of maintenance and endow them
with independent property ownership as their legal entitlement, the question
that remains is to what extent this is feasible without the establishment of a
non-religious, secular framework within which this may be fostered. As long as
law retains the ‘Hindu’ family, can ‘Hindu’ norms be totally revamped ?”

The discussions on the
concrete issues concerning women’s rights is followed by the text of Nidhi
Gupta which analyses the relevance and utility of the concept of legal
pluralism for women’s rights within family law in India. Arguing for the
inevitability of legal pluralism for the purposes of gender justice this text
offers certain epistemological challenges for the contemporary discourses of
women’s rights in India. It contends that prevalent discourses of women’s rights, both
international as well as Indian, are based on crucial misunderstandings by
scholars and activists of Indian society’s understanding of the notion of
rights, of the notion of law, and therefore of its relationship with law.
Focussing specifically on Hindu religion and Hindu family law it further
emphasises that the dominant discourses of Indian women’s rights are misguided,
pursuing their struggle on the basis of Western and colonial misconceptions
about the nature of Hindu society and Hindu family law. Based on these
misconceptions, these discourses have been privileging, perhaps inadvertently
(but probably not by accident), unrealistic and uncalled for aspirations
regarding Indian society. They serve to impose the colonial, modernist and allegedly
universal notions of ‘emancipation’ and models of progress, manifesting
themselves in law as well as through the relationship between law and society,
and leading to particularistic understandings of rights as the basis of
organisation of a developed society. These discourses, while propagating the
aim of equal legal rights, have failed to take into account limitations of the
modernist legal rights discourse in general, and for Indian society in
particular. Nidhi Gupta, focussing on the general issues of women’s rights,
claims a recognised space for elements of tradition as part of the present and
the future, and to argue for the constructive application of legal pluralism
for the purposes of securing gender justice in family matters.

After
the excursion into family law, the last contributions deal with the general
issues of legal pluralism in the context of Indian legal reality. A. P. Singh
makes a nice transition towards this last wave in his article where he develops
the thesis that legal pluralism is the essence of India’s classical legal
ordering, which he illustrates through the example of adoption in Hindu law.
After a presentation of current theories on legal pluralism, the author turns
to the Indian paradigm. If in Western law pluralism rather appears as a
problem, an anormality of law, classical Indian legal thought has always
emphasized pluralism. It is thus very important to differentiate the underlying
horizons of thought to be able to understand Indian approaches to law
adequately. For A. P. Singh the recognition of pluralism in the Indian system
goes hand in hand with a stress put on authority which contrasts to the stress
put on legality in Western systems. Indeed, law instead of being seen as the
expression of the state’s power directed towards uniform regulation of all the
citizens’ lives, is based on smriti, whose precepts are an authority “(…)
because they are the expression of a law, which rules human activity in the
sense we understand that word in natural sciences. (…) this law has no
constraining power in itself. It really puts forward an ideal ‘lightpost’ that
everybody attempts to conform to, but in his own way. (…) The ideal received
the dynamic imparted to it by faith by Hinduism itself with the result that the
custom and written law were inextricably woven together to give rise to law.”
A. P. Singh draws another important conclusion which stresses the role of law
as that which shapes the reproduction of our societies: analysis should “move
away from an exclusive focus on situatios of dispute to an analysis of ordering
in non-dispute situations”.

Probably
the link of law and politics make us especially aware of law’s deeper essence,
which cannot be reduced to conflict resolution alone, but rather consists if we
build on Michel Alliot’s definition of law, on the putting of forms and putting
into forms of the struggles and the consensuses of the outcomes of the
struggles a society considers as being vital.[29]
With his contribution on decentralization, politics and legal pluralism in West
Bengal, Douglas Hill stresses this governance aspect of law. The case study he
presents is especially interesting as it permits to illustrate the tensions
between legal pluralism and decentralization via the implementation of Panchayati
Raj (government of village
community). It also highlights the close link between law and politics, which
should not be a surprise to the social scientist, but nevertheless constitutes
a challenge to any “pure theory of law”,[30]
a vision which continues to influence numerous lawyers’ outlook on law. Further
politics cannot be disentangled from economic conditions. We thus again find
ourselves in a situation where in order to understand the legal game in a
context of implementation of decentralization and implementation of Panchayati
Raj, the questions must not only be put from an institutional point of view,
but need to be asked from the broader social context in which the
institutionalization is taking place. “(…) the devolution of responsibility to
the Panchayats is hollow unless they also have considerably more fiscal
devolution. (…) a full account of legal pluralism needs to account for another
normative order, that of the evolving global economic system, of which India’s
recent tryst with liberalization in certainly a part. The evolving centre-state
relations are thus the broader context in which the micro-politics of the
Panchayats are taking place.”

This
last remark that points to the need to view the problematics of legal pluralism
as processes embedded in different, coexisting temporal and spatial scales,
well introduces D. Parthasarathy’s reflexion on the shifting fields of
legitimacy through the analysis of globalization and resistance in a historical
perspective. D. Parthasarty shifts the centre of analysis from the usual
emphasis in studies on legal pluralism in a context of globalization on reduced
sovereignties of the state and increased power in the hands of transnational
bodies to the other side of the coin : the implications and ethical and
political consequences of bypassing democratic institutions for non-democratic
external agents as is happening with the increased forum shopping by rights
groups, NGOs and people’s movements against development policies and projects.
His historical approach puts this trend into perspective through showing that
“(…) historically, while the refusal to accept ‘imperial’ or ‘colonial’
interventionin the case of
‘desirable’ social reform was a significant trend during the national movement,
there have also been periods when groups have sought colonial intervention,
perceiving colonial rule and legal-juridical systems as less arbitrary than
systems deriving from the indigenous social order.” Thus if the problematic of
conflicts and contradictions arising from external interventions in the legal
and judicial sphere of a nation are not new, these questions take a new
significance in the contemporary context where project law seems to often
overrule state law and where the new twist seems to be an economicisation[31]
of society fundamental ethical and political challenges emerge, where “good
governance” is presented as a neutral and “good tool” but which in fact
conceals issues of powerrelations and the distribution of power : “(…) despite
the ‘modernizaton’ aspects of legal and institutional changes brought about by
economic liberalization and globalization, by being tied to very pragmatic
objectives such as profits, cheap labour, efficiency and so on, external
interventions in the legal sphere, while offering increase choice for forum shopping
and making the legal system less arbitrary, at the same time downplay values
and ideologies which are significant in politicizing issues of equity and
justice.”

In
the last contribution of this issue of the Indian Socio-Legal Journal on Legal
Pluralism in India, Christoph Eberhard wonders if the present challenge is not
to go beyond legal pluralism as an analytical frame in order to understand
law’s games in modern India. Building on the insights gained in the different
contributions the author argues that more than the recognition of legal
pluralism, the main stake is to start rethinking law in a pluralistic and
intercultural way. This can only be achieved if the point of view is changed
and if law is seen from the point of view of the totality of social life,
instead of viewing it–and in some cases even social life – from the point of
view of law, often even reduced to a statist view. This entails a dynamic
anthropology of law such as developed by Étienne Le Roy.[32]
It also entails to engage in genuine intercultural dialogue in order to be able
to emancipate debates from a framework which is largely undermined by Western
conceptions which are still presented as the universal horizon for the
organization of human living together. This paper is also an attempt to make
Francophone approaches to legal anthropology available for an Anglophone
audience.

[4] Sally Engle Merry, ibid; Harold J. Berman, Law and
Revolution, The Formation of Western Legal Tradition,(Harvard
University Press, Cambridge, USA, 1983). Berman argues that pluralism has been
one of the specific characteristics of the Western Legal Tradition.

[14] For
Vanderlinden’s new concept of legal pluralism see Vanderlinden Jacques, ,
“Return to Legal Pluralism : Twenty Years Later ”, 28 Journal of Legal
Pluralism and Unofficial Law, 149-157; (1989) Vanderlinden
Jacques, “Vers une nouvelle conception du pluralisme juridique ”, 18.2 Revue
de la Recherche Juridique-Droit prospectif, 573-583.
(1993). For
a critique on its individualistic character see Gordon Woodman, “Why There Can
Be No Map of Law”, in Rajendra Pradhan (ed.), 3 Legal Pluralism and
Unofficial Law in Social, Economic and Political Development. Papers ofthe XIIIth International Congress of
the Commission on Folk Law and Legal Pluralism, 383-405,
(Kathmandu, ICNEC).

[25] J.F. Holleman, op.
cit. supra f.n. 10 at 603-5,
Holleman has forcefully argued for the necessity of serious recognition of
legal pluralism for the purposes of legal reforms in most of the ex-colonial
states.

[26] Vasudha Dhagamwar, Invasion of Criminal
Law by Religion, Custom and Family Law, Economic and Political Weekly, 1483-1492 (April 12, 2003)

[28] See Étienne Le Roy’s introduction to
the issue of Cahiers d’anthropologie du Droit, 7-17 (2003), “Les pluralismes juridiques”, whose
title “Le pluralisme juridique aujourd’hui ou l’enjeu de la juridicité” directly
links the issue of legal pluralism to the challenge of a renewed pluralistic
approach to Law, by shifting the point of view from a legal perspective to a
perspective on Law from the point of view of society as a whole. This view
echoes Franz von Benda-Beckmann’s reflexions in “Who’s Afraid of Legal
Pluralism ?” (in Rajendra Pradhan (ed.), 3 Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law in
Social, Economic and Political Development. Papers ofthe XIIIth International Congress of the Commission on Folk
Law and Legal Pluralism, 417 (275-298) (Kathmandu, ICNEC), which he concludes noting that “(…)
the discussions easily become sterile unless they are rooted in the analysis of
empirical situations and historical processes, and unless they are made part of
a more comprehensive social scientific understanding of the social world of
which law and legal pluralism, however defined, are only one aspect and part.”